Acclaimed Writer of Literary and Creative Nonfiction
Recently Published
Writing Ukraine
Myrna's term as writer in residence at Athabasca University began shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In this essay, based on her writer-in-residence lecture at Athabasca University, Kostash offers a self-critical reflection on her body of work and considers how her visits to Ukraine and the ongoing war have nuanced her writing about and understanding of Ukrainian Canadian identity.
Award Winning
Ghosts in a Photograph a chronicle
Winner of the 2024 KOBZAR Book Award - Shevchenko Foundation
View book >
Recent Articles
Myrna wrote the Afterword to a fascinating collection of essays, Ukrainian Canadian Visual Art, that was recently launched in the art gallery of the Alberta Council for Ukrainian Arts.
Myrna has uploaded an unpublished essay to academia.edu which is tagged there as Montana History,Louis Riel,Metis' storytelling, oral tradition, Michif language.
About Myrna
Myrna Kostash is an acclaimed writer of literary and creative nonfiction who makes her home in Edmonton when she is not travelling in pursuit of her varied literary interests and passions. These have taken her from school halls in Vancouver, BC, to Ukrainian weddings in Two Hills, Alberta; from the site of the mass grave of Cree warriors in Battleford, Saskatchewan, to a fishers’ meeting in Digby, Nova Scotia; from the British Library in London, UK, to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. She is inspired in her work by her childhood in the Ukrainian-Canadian community of Edmonton, her rites of passage through the Sixties in the US, Canada and Europe, by her discovery of the New Journalism and feminism in the 1970s, by her rediscovery of her western Canadian roots in the 1980s, and most recently, by her return to her spiritual sources in Byzantium and the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) Church.
Author photo by Markian Lozowchuk/Redux
News & Events
Book Launch: Myrna Kostash, Ghosts in a Photograph
Thursday, November 14th, 2024 at 6:30 PM
Join us in person at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada as we proudly host the Saskatoon book launch of Ghosts in a Photograph by acclaimed nonfiction writer Myrna Kostash. This mesmerizing book explores the journey of Kostash's grandparents from Galicia, now Ukraine, to Alberta at the turn of the twentieth century.
The book's genius is in how it weaves Ukrainian and Canadian political history, contextualizing the stories of two familes (one homesteaders, one working-class Edmontonian) with the historic struggles for Ukrainian independence and the genocidal "clearing of the plains" in Canada.
With Kostash in attendance to read from and speak about her book, this will be an extraordinary literary event.
Translating All of Baba's Children
First published in 1977, Myrna Kostash's legendary book All of Baba’s Children is approaching its 50th anniversary.
All of Baba’s Children investigates the darker corners of Canadian identity, celebrates a people's “great adventure” and has become part of the literary heritage of the West. Myrna's probing of the experiences of three generations of Ukrainians in Canada rapidly became a bestseller.
Today, the book continues to attract its new readers, and much interest in this seminal work is also growing in Ukraine. What does All of Baba's Children mean to today's Ukrainian community in Canada? How can we 'translate' the book for new audiences at home and internationally?
Join Myrna Kostash, author of All of Baba’s Children, in conversation with Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Director Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, and Olha Poliukhovych, literary critic, scholar, and VP of Research and Academic Affairs at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, as they discuss the writing of All of Baba’s Children, its impact across the years, the broader community understanding of Ukrainian Canadians, and the revived interest in this work in Ukraine.
CUCS Reading Club
"We found the book to be extremely intellectually stimulating, innovative for its time, and relevant today."
Yulia Ivaniuk Squires, Coordinator, Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies University of Manitoba
Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies
We are pleased to invite you to a lecture at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies featuring Myrna Kostash, the acclaimed Kobzar award-winning nonfiction writer.
"Ghosts in a Photograph" wins 2024 KOBZAR Book Award - Shevchenko Foundation
The Audreys Recommend
[Edify magazine] asked for local book recommendations so you don't have toBy Cory Schachtel | May 28, 2024
Round Table Discussion
On May 7, 2023 Myrna was part of a round table discussion that followed a performance of Punctuate Theatre's First Métis Man of Odesa at the Rice Theatre in Edmonton.
Reading the River
Thanks to the initiative of University of Alberta scholars, Jessica Zychowicz and Vita Yakovleva, Myrna was included in events during the University's International Week 2020.
Speakers' Series of the St John's Cathedral branch
As part of the Speakers' Series of the St John's Cathedral branch of the Ukrainian Women's Association of Canada, Myrna spoke in Edmonton at St John's Cultural Centre about Ukrainian settler-Indigenous relations.
Read more >
An Evening with Myrna Kostash
In October 2018, at “An Evening with Myrna Kostash,” Myrna presented a talk to the Melbourne members of the Association of Ukrainians of Victoria (Aus), “Ancestors and Elders: Ukrainian-Canadian Settlers, the First Nations and the Myth of ‘Free Land.'”
Read lecture >
Interview with Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
Myrna’s interview with Greek writer, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, appears in issue #101 of Brick magazine (Myrna’s favourite hot spot for literary nonfiction). Buy a copy!
The Seven Oaks Reader, continues to get notice:
Good Reads review >
All Lit Up overview >
Scottish Review of Books >
Alvin Finkel, Athabasca University >
Kobzar Literary Award
Myrna is thrilled to be one of seven women writers who have won the Kobzar Biennial Literary Award for "outstanding contributions to Canadian literary arts by authors who develop a Ukrainian Canadian theme with literary merit" for the anthology Unbound: Ukrainian-Canadians Writing Home, edited by Lindy Ledohowski and Lisa Grekul and published by University of Toronto Press with cover art by Toronto artist Natalka Husar. The prize, worth $25,000 and sponsored by the Shevchenko Foundation, was announced at a sold-out gala in Toronto March 1, 2018.
Media
Presentation by Myrna
In 2021, as part of an online Roundtable on the subject of Land, hosted by the Indigenous Ukrainian Relationship Initiative (Myrna is a founding member) Myrna presented a PowerPoint in which she told the story of Ukrainian homesteaders on Treaty Six Territory and of her own journey from that heritage. Here are the images >
Myrna Kostash named Athabasca University’s 2022-23 Writer in Residence
NeWest Press Podcast
Photos
Zemlya/Nanaskomun, We Give Thanks for the Land was a Ukrainian-Canadian and Aboriginal Ceremonial Exchange of Gifts presented to both communities in September 2012 by Myrna Kostash and Sharon Pasula, Metis activist. The program booklet for Shumka Dancers' recent new production, Ancestors and Elders, April 2018 and March 2019 states: "We acknowledge the foresight of Myrna Kostash and Sharon Pasula whose project entitled Zemlya/Nanaskomun first brought these stories to our attention."
From the Blog
- What Is Peace In a Time of War?I try to imagine – fifty-eight years after the event – the impact on the Vietnamese, whether armed Viet Cong in jungle trenches or villagers cowering under a hail of ammo – of massed, youthful choruses, halfway across the planet, screaming in unison Make Love Not War! And how Read more >
- Being Ukrainian Orthodox in a Time of War: Part OneI began writing this post near the end of February 2022, on tenterhooks along with much of the world about the likelihood of a war being unleashed by Russian military forces on the sovereign territory of Ukraine. As I post it, this is Day 125 of Russia’s war on Ukraine and its people. July 12 Read more >